Dear George, What have you changed your mind about?

by John Holbo on August 4, 2009

I’m enjoying our George Scialabba event, and I enjoyed George’s book. My contribution will be up tomorrow, or thereabouts. But I want to ask a separate question of our author: what has he changed his mind about? Which of these pieces look, to him, dated or short-sighted? I assume he declined to reprint anything he now thinks is just not worth reading anymore, but I suspect some of this stuff looks critically mixed in retrospect.

In responding to such a book, the good old eternal present tense is too efficient to neglect: “Scialabba thinks …” No time like the present for starting arguments. It won’t let the past bury its dead, the present won’t. But then I think: this is nuts. A lot of these writings are two decades old, or older. And it was pretty politically and culturally topical to begin with. Nothing wrong with that. I’m not saying it’s ephemeral, but it’s not the sort of thing that stays preserved perfectly in amber in a living author’s mind. If only George had died along the way, things would be so much simpler. One argues with the dead in the present tense. (That is not just efficient but a polite way of not drawing attention to an awkward medical condition.) But George is alive, alive! We must take advantage of this situation while it lasts, I am sure he will agree.

Let me be more specific: George, do you still admire Dwight McDonald so all-fired much as you evidently did during the Reagan administration? (George responds.) Yes, that’s fair enough. But surely some of that stuff about masscult and midcult is a bit past it’s sell-by? If only because a lot has changed, not necessarily even because McDonald was wrong about what he saw in his day? Yet you still seem pretty attached to that outlook. (George responds.) Interesting. Do you think that’s partly just stubborn contrarianism on your part? Or maybe nostalgia?

Stuff like that.

George, maybe you can mull it over for a few days and make a ‘looking backwards’ post at or near the end of our event. I know that’s not necessarily a small thing. But I, for one, would would be very interested. And I really liked your book.

I applaud John Holbo’s semi-courageous move to kind-of question the point of this seminar on George Scialabba’s greatest hits package.

I would have thought that Scialabba is interesting mainly as a phenomenon rather than any of his particular opinions or how they have changed since original publication. He is a talisman for the collection of people who are attracted to a blog like this: Everyone is very educated but relatively few seem to be in mainstream academia, yet they care about what academia does/says and how that relates to other well educated people outside academia. Scialabba is the poster boy for this general sensibility, which he pulls off very well by treating academics and non-academic public intellectuals with equal (dis)respect, as if they were part of a common conversation.

The utopian forum created in his own text approximates the promised land of the people who dedicate themselves to a blog like this – and here I have in mind mainly the academics, who probably fixate on Scialabba as a nostalgic oasis, illusorily suggesting a time when there were lots of people like himself around who could speak their mind openly and intelligently without worrying about peer review, tenure, blah, blah. But did those halcyon days ever exist? And could they be institutionalised now?

Perhaps my assessment will strike you as cynical, but I don’t mean it that way at all. I think if academics took a little more systematic interest in what is entailed – intellectually and institutionally – by ‘academic freedom’, this discussion of Scialabba’s work wouldn’t carry the whiff of Arcadia.

Apart from noting the general tone of the comment (fwiw I personally find Steven Fuller interesting neither as a person or as a phenomenon), I’ll confine myself to observing that my personal view of what is entailed intellectually and institutionally by ‘academic freedom’ does not include (to take a general example) providing free play for academics trolling it up by sock-puppeting other people’s blogs with arseholish comments.

@Henry As one with even more experience of sockpuppeteer attacks than the rest of the CT crew (my blog has had regular infestations of this particularly nasty subspecies of troll), I find it interesting how few can maintain the “good hand, bad hand” distinction that seems to make sockpuppetry an appealing, if obviously dishonest, strategy. Rather, in most cases, the offensive tone seems to be the same whether the posts are supposedly from the puppeteer or the puppet. Perhaps a research topic for the University of Warwick?

Frankly, I don’t know what it is with you guys’ fixation on ‘sockpuppets’. Is this some condom fantasy gone astray? But since you bring it up, I think one reason why it sometimes makes sense to write in disguise is precisely to avoid the sort of lazy response Henry gave, namely, ‘Oh, it’s Steve Fuller. He’s a bad guy. Therefore let me simply raise this very point to dismiss what he says without having to answer it’. You see, ‘sockpuppetry’ (if I understand this lingo correctly) is sometimes an attempt to inhibit your interlocutor’s worst ad hominem tendencies. Not always, of course. But actually, I think a little sockpuppetry might have helped the discussion along in this case.

Steve – it is because we have long experience of you as someone who is clearly more interested in stirring up reaction than in actually engaging in serious argument, and is (to make no bones about it) a troll, that we don’t care to respond to you as though you were commenting in good faith. And I really do think that the topic of ‘sockpuppetry – do Jekyll and Hyde finally start to blend into one?’ is one that deserves extensive further research.

To get back to something like the original topic, I find that blogs make it much easier to admit errors and changes of view, if you’re so inclined. That in turn makes it easier to risk error by throwing out statements that may turn out to be wrong. Part of this is a matter of attitude (it’s only a blog post, what do you expect?) and partly the facility of publishing whenever you want to, and linking to the point you wish to abandon/amend.

Thanks for asking, John. Two things come to mind that have profoundly altered, not so much my opinions as my mood. Three decades ago I was a cosmic optimist and rationalist of the Condorcet/Godwin/H.G Wells variety. The arc of humanity’s progress was still somewhat obscured by irrational throwbacks like the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Indochina cataclysm, but I thought it emerged unmistakably when traced back farther, to the primitive, prehistoric war of all against all. The direction of humanity’s, in fact the universe’s, evolution seemed irreversible: toward the more and more complete dominance of mind over matter, until eventually all life everywhere would be absorbed in what Arthur C. Clarke, in Childhood’s End/i>, my youthful gospel (or Book of Revelations), called the Overmind.

Moral and material progress marched in tandem in this uplifting vision. Godwin’s son-in-law, Shelley, wore a ring on which was inscribed il buon tempo verra: the millennium will come, the good will triumph, every sorrow will be redeemed and every tear wiped away. This seemed to me plausible, as well as too beautiful and satisfying not to be true.

I don’t actually disbelieve this now. But after three decades of Reagan/Gingrich/Bush/Cheney, I’m numb. I can barely remember what it felt like to believe that all things are working together unto good. Living through so much daily evidence of greed, stupidity, deceit, hypocrisy, and murderous violence was like
inhaling a vile smog every day for three decades. As my lungs would be weakened and encrusted with dirt in that case, so is my spirit in this. Or maybe I’m just getting old.

The other thing that’s changed me has been encountering the nonfiction writings of D. H. Lawrence. Lasch is a compelling critic of modernity, but Lawrence is something else altogether: a mighty antimodern prophet. (The two volumes of Phoenix, his collected nonfiction, are sacred scripture.) If I didn’t expect (from long, unhappy experience) to be laughed at, I would call him the greatest thinker (outside the sciences) of the twentieth century. I hope someday to say why I think so; I began in a short essay in my first book, Divided Mind, which can be downloaded from my website, http://www.georgescialabba.net.

I can’t say I agree fundamentally with Lawrence, or even that I fully understand him. But since reading him, my mind is forever divided.

Three decades ago I was a cosmic optimist and rationalist of the Condorcet/Godwin/H.G Wells variety. The arc of humanity’s progress was still somewhat obscured by irrational throwbacks like the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Indochina cataclysm, but I thought it emerged unmistakably when traced back farther, to the primitive, prehistoric war of all against all. The direction of humanity’s, in fact the universe’s, evolution seemed irreversible: toward the more and more complete dominance of mind over matter, until eventually all life everywhere would be absorbed in what Arthur C. Clarke, in Childhood’s End, my youthful gospel (or Book of Revelations), called the Overmind.

Ah, now I begin to understand: George, you say this (or, to use the appropriate tense, you once would have said this) like it’s a good thing. I would never have expected this, since there’s nothing even faintly technorationalist about you now. And oddly enough, I once believed something very much like this right around the same time you did, three decades ago, although I was 17 at the time (and I devoured Childhood’s End, too). So you’re saying that your sympathy with modernity’s most ardent leftist critics is, in part, an argument with your younger selves? Well, you know what Yeats says we make out of arguments with ourselves….

Well, thanks, I wish I had fused these very disparate strands into some interesting whole. In fact, though, it’s messier and less fruitful than that. I’m a technorationalist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a Laschian-Lawrentian producerist-pagan on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Sunday I just sleep and read novels.

Lasch is a compelling critic of modernity, but Lawrence is something else altogether: a mighty antimodern prophet.

Alan Ryan gave that label to Lasch in a wonderful NYRB essay on his last collection of writings. Interesting to see Lawrence added to a list which includes Heidegger, Marx, Freud, Lasch…and perhaps Georges Sorel, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, E.F. Schumacher , Philip Rieff, and more. I strongly suspect that Michael Harrington figures in there somewhere, but I’m not a good enough reader to figure out quite how.

Oddly enough, I’ve moved in the opposite direction. That is, I’ve believed in the Internet, or something like it, since I saw my first computer terminal at about age 12, but now that it’s here, it’s actually more powerful and transformational than I dared to hope, and I think (see also the Pinker post just above this one) has the potential to make for a much better world.

Of course, it also does an efficient job in amplifying all kinds of bad things, so there’s plenty of room for technopessimism.

Childhood’s End contains its own critique, doesn’t it? The pre-Overmind social systems are destroyed; the people looking on from our viewpoint have to take it on faith that the process will result in something better, but because of their lack of understanding it’s experienced as a purely destructive process. I am not surprised that people who identified with it as their early idiom of progress are susceptible to second thoughts about the whole idea.

I also think that calling it technorationalist is a misleading description, one that obscures how someone can be a “producerist-pagan” at the same time. It’s technologically inflected mysticism. Teihard de Chardin is an instructive read in that regard, because on the surface he sounds scientific, but his view of evolution is just as unscientific as any guided-evolutionist’s. There’s nothing wrong with mysticism per se, but it isn’t technorationalism, and it’s quite compatible with a belief that a modernity that seems to be destroying rather than preserving something good must be a wrong turn.

Yes and no, Rich. It’s true, in a sense, that the real technorationalists in Childhood’s End are the guardian race, the Overlords, who prepare humanity for assimilation into the Overmind. But Lasch and Lawrence would say that what Overlords and whatever became the Overmind have in common is a rejection of limits and an aspiration to transcend their respective natures, to improve them out of all recognition, to leave them behind, rather than to inhabit them ever more deeply — to move outward rather than inward. Pagans and yeomen accept limits — embrace them.

There is more than one way of rejecting limits, though. The mystic rejects Earthly limits in favor of a sort of mergence with God. Technorationalism, however — even though this is perhaps observed mostly in the breach — should be distinguished by an adherence to science. And the idea that evolution is progressive, that species have a natural direction that they travel from lower to higher, is just as wrong scientifically as Lamarckianism.

Confusing technologically inflected mysticism with technorationalism should always lead to disappointment, because mysticism involves hopes that no rationalism can deliver on.

George, now you’re beginning to sound like some of my localist friends at Front Porch Republic. (In a good way, I hasten to add; there’s a strong and unfortunate paleolibertarian streak over there, which I deplore, but also some intelligent defenses of populist sovereignty and participatory democracy, if you look for them.)

Seriously, I need to read you book. (Interlibrary load copy on the way, though!)